Is he really dead? No, he’s in Iran. It’s a Shiite majority over there so they like Hezbollah, send ’em money, ammo, whole bit. Our guy gets noticed by the higher-ups because he’s got this knack for languages, picks ’em up like that, accents, jargon, dialects, the whole tamale, plus he hates—despises—America. Thinks we’ve got a plot to control the world with our “cultural exports,” which you know what that means: how come our nice girls start whipping off their head scarves every time Brad shows up on the screen?
So these Iranians, they’ve got an extremist chameleon on their hands who hates America—but hates it. So whaddo they do? Set him up somewhere, Africa, let’s say—Kenya—gets married all over again, new name, new history, starts a business doing import-export. But really, he’s part of an intelligence network, people who let’s just say our health and happiness aren’t real big on their priority list. But our guy gets restless fast, he’s got all this hate inside him and it’s eating him up and he wants to do something. Wants action! So when Hezbollah doesn’t move fast enough, he disappears again. Poof, can’t find him. Hooks up with some more splintery types, coupla rich guys in the deep background pulling strings. They want to send him to America, do some real damage. Horse’s mouth, right? Whack the Holland Tunnel, whack the White House. Hey, don’t kid yourself—this stuff goes on! He relocates to Libya, Afghanistan, wherever. Doesn’t matter. New name, new wife. Then at a certain point the guys in the shadows say go. To America. Poof, he’s out the door. Doesn’t look back. Buncha phony documents in his hand. And where does he wind up? One guess. New fucking Jersey—how about that?
Charlotte followed Roz through sliding glass doors to the backyard, tonguing her cup of foam as she stepped into a familiar grind of wood against concrete, a sound like an electric saw in reverse. She made out a swimming pool girded by slouching, comma-shaped sentries, boys without jackets spurting one at a time up the sides of the empty pool and landing on its rim. Charlotte wondered if Ricky might be among them, her blurred eyes fumbling in search of her brother, but no, he’d lost his skateboard back in January and refused to buy another, even though Charlotte had offered to help pay for it.
Resting her screamers, Roz was uncharacteristically quiet.
“Whose house is this?” Charlotte asked her.
Okay, I know what you’re thinking (said the voice), I’m reading your mind as we speak. What’s this story about? You’re thinking, God help us if it’s terrorism, because Nightmare in Gaza tanked and Middle East Massacre barely broke even, including international.
(“Paul Lofgren’s,” Roz said.)
You’re thinking God forbid this is some kind of history of the Arab-Israeli conflict, I mean not even Spielberg’s taken that one on, and he can make just about anything taste sweet. You’re saying, How can we root for this guy? He’s a jerk, a fanatic. A loony. What kind of guy walks out on family after family? It’s not human, right? Okay, look. The movie’s got nothing to do with history. Wigs, horses, sex scenes where they have to paw through all that lace—this isn’t like that. This is about self-discovery. It’s one man’s personal history!
And sure enough, Charlotte made out Paul Lofgren inside the pool, grinding up against the edge. Roz’s sort-of-boyfriend came outside and bit her cheek and she went away with him, leaving Charlotte among the bevy of skateboarding spectators, one of whom, the guy beside her, was starting to look familiar. Charlotte stared at him with the brazenness of the nearly blind until at last he looked back. “Hey,” he said, and she recognized the voice. Scott Hess.
Charlotte turned back to the pool, mortified.
“Hell—o—o.” Scott was waving an arm in front of her eyes. Except the arm was not an arm, but a white triangular shape. An arm in a sling. “We’re twins,” he said.
She’d forgotten about her Ace bandage. Now she lifted it, returning his goofy salute. And realized, then, that Scott Hess had no idea who she was.
“Happened to your arm?” he asked.
“I got caught in the middle of a fight.”
“No way,” he said, admiringly. “Mine’s from sliding into second. It’s not a break, just a really bad sprain. But I’m probably out for the season, ’cause swinging a bat is like totally out of the question.”
“Mine’s just bruised,” Charlotte said, and smiled a little helplessly.
“Could be a sprain,” Scott mused. “It’s a fine line between a bruise and a sprain, I mean basically it just comes down to inflammation. You get much swelling?”
“Not really.”
“Mine? The first day? It was like, three times the normal size at least. My girlfriend was like, don’t come near me with that thing.”
Charlotte laughed, but it sounded like someone else, as if her makeup were laughing.
“What’s your name?” Scott asked, and she hesitated, still afraid this was all some multilayered joke at her expense. “Melanie,” she finally said, and experienced a thrill that gave her gooseflesh.
“You don’t go to Baxter.”
“No,” she said. “East.”
Self-discovery! Hear me out. Who is our guy exactly? He hates Americans, that’s all we really know. But see, where does he make sense? Where does he fit? Over in Europe, they’re still yammering about who took out whose castle three hundred years ago, who’s got the nicest accent. Who cares? We’re heading into the twenty-first century. With us it’s the opposite: Build your own castle, make up an accent if it rocks your boat. Start from scratch. And that’s our guy to a T! That’s what he’s been doing from the beginning. Don’t you get it? He’s American! He’s been American all his life, the whole time he was hating our guts! Which is what he finally figures out. The self-discovery. Which is what this movie’s about!
“I’m Scott.”
“Hello, Scott.”
And now he was shaking her hand, injured arm to injured arm, exchanging with Charlotte a secret intimate handshake of the fallen. She went along, laughing a little uncontrollably.
“How long you have to wear it?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I haven’t even gone to the doctor.”
“Oh. Hey. Mel. Lemme give you some advice.” Scott was serious now, with serious warnings to dispense. “I know how it is,” he said, “no time and all that, you’re like hey, everything’s fine, whatever, but freshman year? I twisted my knee and I didn’t go to the doc for like two weeks … ?”
(Now the boisterous narrator went abruptly silent, blew away like dust, leaving Michael West alone beside the barbed-wire fence.)
“… and no shit, they said if I waited one more day, I could’ve had permanent damage in the cartilage.”
“Wow,” Charlotte said. “Permanent damage!” She was gulping laughter, inhaling it, popping it with her ears, blinking it back inside her head. She felt the old excitement of talking to strangers, except that Scott Hess was the opposite of a stranger: he was the boy who’d taken her virginity in under five minutes, then tossed her out of his car. But Charlotte wasn’t that girl anymore. She’d cut ties with that humiliation, and was Melanie now. Who wore makeup. She was the stranger. Scott Hess had nothing on her.
“And as it is, the doc says I might end up with knee problems later on, you know, like when I’m older and stuff, from the injuries and also just the wear and—”
“Scott,” she interrupted, “that’s enough whining for one night.”
He peered at her, startled, then laughed—a nervous, wheezy laugh. “Funny,” he said. “Very funny, Melanie.”
“Actually, I’m serious,” she said, but she was laughing, too. She and Scott were laughing together. “I have to get out of here,” she said.
The voice gone, its garish performance complete, Michael found himself alone at the edge of a condominium development surrounded by perfect silence. And here came the terror, raw, wild: a panic whose shadow he’d sensed flickering near him these past months was on him, now, at last. He scaled the barbed wire and began to run across the planted field, sprinting over acres
of loose earth, running anywhere, away, the opposite direction of where he’d come from. They’d won, stamped out his anger and filled his head with this poison—listen to it! Listen to it. The scorpion sting had erased his real thoughts and replaced them with a plan to go to Los Angeles and make movies—exchange plots for plots! Spread the poison even further. They’d won! Running, he tripped, fell sprawling among short green stalks and lay there whole minutes, heart punching the soil. Then he turned his head to look at the moon, cooler now, white, the precious moon; “Listen to it,” he whispered, beseeching the moon, “they’re controlling my thoughts.” But in English, always in English. He thought in English, dreamed in English. It was too late. The other languages were gone, his past was gone and so was his rage, it had vanished with the conspiracy. Because there was no conspiracy—no “them” in this nation of believers. Only us.
Charlotte left the swimming pool and pushed open a sliding glass door at the far end of the house. She slipped inside a white-curtained master bedroom, elongated shapes of skateboarders flung like shadow puppets over the walls. From the bedroom she reached a hallway and began opening doors, looking for—what? A place to laugh, except her laughter was gone, had burned away, leaving a little pile of ashes in her throat.
She opened doors: A girl’s room, four people gurgling over a bong amidst hundreds of stuffed animals. A boy’s room—Paul’s? Paul’s brother’s? Did Paul Lofgren have a brother? It was empty. Charlotte went in and shut the door and sat on the bed, breathing the odor of teenage boy, sweat, cedar, mildew, Juicy Fruit. Something herbal—pot maybe. She lay back on the bed and shut her eyes.
Slowly, Michael rose to his feet. The panic had passed through him and gone. He began walking slowly back through the planted field toward the nimbus of light that first had drawn him there.
Charlotte pulled her glasses from her purse and wiped them clean, restoring them to her face so the room crashed into focus, a dresser crammed with trophies, silver soccer balls affixed to feet, gold hockey sticks soldered to hands, Blackhawks posters attached to walls along with several Baxter flags. The world remade itself, and she was Charlotte Hauser once again, from Rockford, Illinois. Who wore glasses. Scanning the reconstituted room in which she sat, she noticed a familiar shape beneath the dresser and knelt on the carpet to pull it out. A skateboard. A Tony Hawk, in fact. On its underside, in neat, felt-tipped capital letters, the name “RICKY HAUSER.”
Charlotte hefted the board under her arm and departed Paul’s room, shutting the door behind her. She left the house, navigating among boys who floated aside like inner tubes on a lake to let her pass.
Michael climbed back over the barbed-wire fence. Beyond it he saw the sample Victorian houses, the fake gas lamps with their flame-shaped bulbs. In the distance he made out his car, parked where he had left it.
Outside, Charlotte walked some distance from Paul’s house before setting down the board and tentatively mounting it. She’d ridden Ricky’s skateboard before, and it wasn’t that far to her house. As Michael made his way toward the sparkling sidewalks, a calm began to rise in him. Yes, he thought. He wasn’t lost. His car was right there, in the lamplight.
Charlotte pushed off, working her legs, feeling the wind along her arms, holding them out like the scarecrows you still saw, sometimes, in the fields of corn.
He wasn’t lost. He was home.
Chapter Sixteen
Excepting last August, during the accident, I had not been back to Rock-ford in seven years, following a visit I’d terminated prematurely after a shouted exchange of insults with my brother-in-law during Roast Beef Night at the country club. Yet the drive west on I-90 from Chicago to Rockford was intensely familiar: the rusted, jiggling trucks that looked hopelessly irreconcilable with the digital age, tarps fastened over their cargoes of dirt, of old tires; the freestanding mirrored office cubes that seemed not just postindustrial but posthuman; the overpasses with their old beige McDonald’s built in the sixties, when fast food was still racy, cosmopolitan. Every few miles, a thirty-cent toll basket would materialize before me like a recurring dream, and I would toss thirty cents down its mechanical gullet and wait for the barrier to rise.
“How does it feel,” Irene asked, “making this drive again?” She sat beside me, fiddling with the radio on the cherry-red Grand Am we’d rented at the airport. The Chicago stations were just beginning to fade.
I tried to consider the question. How did it feel? But almost immediately, the breathless narrator who had taken up a pampered existence in one lobe of my brain (red curtains, ostrich feather slippers) began piping in her own treacly reply: It had been nearly a year since the devastating event, and oh, the pain Charlotte felt on returning to the scene, the anguish of seeing those same fields scarred by terrible memories … and as she spewed this dreck, tilting her face for the overhead camera, I felt not just unable to speak, but unable to feel. “Like nothing,” I said. “I could be absolutely anywhere.”
Irene didn’t write, which disappointed me. When many minutes passed without the scratch of her pen, I felt a mounting sense of urgency.
We were visiting Rockford this afternoon in early June at the behest of Thomas Keene, “gathering visuals,” as he put it. An all-expenses-paid trip to the middle of nowhere, so Irene could photograph and videotape the house where I grew up, the cemetery where Ellen Metcalf and I used to smoke, my grade school, high school, country club; Dr. Fabermann in his surgical scrubs, Mary Cunningham and her moss-crammed fishpond, and most vitally, the stretch of interstate where the accident had happened—the field where I’d landed in my burning car.
Last week, Thomas had sent a professional photographer to my apartment: Randall Knapp, a solemn, beturtlenecked fellow with a single earnest crease running straight up the middle of his face, beginning at his cleft chin, advancing along the points of his lips and concluding in two deep grooves between his beseeching eyebrows. “Let’s try it without the smile,” he’d importuned woefully as I sat smoking on my sectional couch. “Remember, you’ve lost everything. You don’t know how you’re going to earn a living. There. Good. Hang your head,” all in a gentle murmur that seemed calibrated to coax a reluctant partner through a sequence of daunting sexual positions. “Lose the pose,” he crooned in the bathroom, shooting close-ups of my face as I parted my hair to rub vitamin E oil onto my surgical scars, when in fact I’d stopped doing this months ago. “There’s no glamour here,” he chided me softly, “this is sad, this is a sad, private moment. Yes. There. Looking in the mirror like, Who am I?”
I was so disheartened by the time we adjourned to my balcony that I shuffled to the railing and stood motionless, staring at the river below. A berserk cry jackknifed me into a cringe, nearly pitching me over the edge. Shaken, clutching the railing, panting fearfully, I turned to find Randall Knapp in extremis behind his camera. “Yes! Great!” he yelled, shooting madly through his ululations, “Like that! Frownier. Bunch up your hands on the rail. Awkward, frightened—like that! Beautiful! Yes! Despair!
God! Yes! Yes! Yes!”
I endured these indignities for a reason that was infinitely complex yet capable of being named in a single word: money. Staggering quantities of money were shortly to come my way, according to Thomas; the media potentates before whom he’d dangled my story were responding to my “character,” and phrases like “bidding war,” “TV series” and “publishing tie-in” (which apparently meant a book) had been uttered in conjunction with my name. As the sphincter of other people’s excitement tightened around me for the second time in my life, I spoke to Thomas as often as I once had spoken to Oscar. The sensation was familiar, of course, from my earlier brush with fame, but with a difference: then, I had existed in a state of pure giddy anticipation, but now I felt a constant twitch of anxiety, as if something ominous were stirring in my peripheral vision. When I tried to stare it down, it vanished, but no sooner had I glanced away than it was back, skittering in one corner of my eye.
After Elgin, the mirrored
buildings melted away into fields—bright, iridescent green corn, burnt-orange soybeans. Each one appeared haphazard, disorderly until you hit that angle from which the secret of its perfect geometry was revealed—a dimly remembered pleasure from my childhood—long clean lines like spokes of a wheel extending outward from my eye.
“We’re getting close,” I told Irene. “Close to where it happened.”
“I was thinking we’d save the accident until later,” she said. “Unless you want to stop.”
“We can save it forever,” I said, applying this toward the quota of ironic, curmudgeonly remarks that I now understood were typical of me. Sure enough, Irene took a note.
When the feathery plaint of a cell phone issued from her bag, her face underwent a contraction of unease. The caller was nearly always Thomas—he’d given her the phone so he could reach her easily, now that her spring-term teaching had ended and she was writing not just me but two Ordinaries. “Hello?” she answered with apprehension, but already a shiny simulacrum of cheer was hardening over her hesitancy, culminating now in the utterance “Hihowareyou?” A bright disk of greeting.
“Hihowareyou?” It was Thomas.
“Yes,” Irene said, “we were just … are we getting close to Rockford? We’re fairly close.” Then she lapsed into silence, as was usually the case when she spoke to Thomas. Listening.
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